Karma's Happy Time: Chapter Four

Summary: Karma decides to give Agent Louisiana a crash course in ‘Bitch, Please’, but it turns out a lot differently than anyone planned. Add in a required, incognito demonstration of the Freelancer stealth abilities, Maine as an escort, and a lot of vodka, and suddenly Louisiana's night just got a whole lot more entertaining.


--June 19; 0645 hrs; Mess hall--

“So, exactly how drunk were ya last night?”  were the first words spoken to Louisiana the next morning.

Her bare forehead was resting on the cool metal of the steel table in a vain attempt to gain relief from her throbbing skull. Louisiana lifted her head from the table to gaze blearily at her assailant—because causing a person this much pain, even just by talking, had to be considered some kind of assault—before straightening somewhat so that she was merely slumped on the table, not lying on it.

“’Bout yea drunk,” she responded heavily, holding her arms roughly a meter apart. “How can you tell?”

Her blatantly Irish friend, Dan, took the seat across from her with two steaming cups of coffee and a smug look on his pale freckled face. Louisiana thought vaguely how his light blue shirt nicely complemented his auburn hair and striking blue eyes.

“Must be some kind’a aura about ya,” he said grinning, before continuing on. “That and ya haven’t taken your usual shower; I definitely saw that ketchup stain on those fatigues on ya day before last; an’ da last time I saw ya with a bruise on your pretty li’tle face, ya’d downed almost a fifth o’ vodka by your lonesome the night befar.”

Louisiana stared at him blankly for moment before stating, “Sorry, dude, but I just can’t get through your brogue this early in the morning.” She reached for one of his cups of coffee and took a large gulp before finishing, “I only caught about half of it.”

The older man narrowed his eyes for a moment, thinking, before saying, “Ya look like shit.”

The Freelancer raised her eyebrows at the Standard Issue Soldier, before smiling mysteriously and taking another sip of coffee. Her eyes flickered to something behind Dan, and the Irish soldier turned around, curiously.

Standing at the entrance to the mess hall was Agent Maine, speaking to a very harassed-looking Wyoming. The two argued furiously for a moment—well, Wyoming argued furiously, while Agent Maine simply stood with his arms crossed and looked appropriately intimidating—before the smaller Freelancer in white thrust a large wad of bills at the larger soldier. Then he strode away, practically vibrating with tension.

Maine remained where he was, leisurely counting the bills in his hand, before striding over to where Louisiana and Dan sat watching the exchange.

“Louisiana,” he rumbled in greeting to the young woman, who grinned tiredly at her colleague and raked a hand through her damp hair messily.

“Hey, big guy,” she said, nodding back. Then she gestured at her blue-clad companion, “This is—”

“O’Hara,” Maine finished, nodding in acknowledgement.

Louisiana heard a spluttering sound and looked over at “O’Hara” to see him choking on the coffee that he’d taken that moment to drink from. She pounded her friend on the back and gazed at him with a mixture of concern and amusement.

It matched the look that Dan shot at Maine when the agent also reached over to help, but let it fall to his side when he saw that Louisiana had it covered.

The female Freelancer raised her eyebrows quizzically at the large man, who shrugged. “His brother’s pointed him out before,” Maine growled by way of explanation.

Louisiana rounded on the Irish soldier, much more irritated than she’d been five minutes before. “You have a brother? Since when?”

Dan looked at the young woman interrogating him with no small amount of confusion. “I thought ya knew,” he responded in surprise.

“How?” Louisiana demanded wildly, not quite sure why she was taking such offense to the news. “With my psychic mind powers?”

“Um…”

“Nevermind,” she sighed, noticing the air of amusement that permeated the other Freelancer present. “We will discuss this later,” Louisiana warned, before holding one hand out imperiously to Maine.

“My cut,” she said, looking at the behemoth expectantly.

The fully-armored Freelancer heaved a sigh, selected a few bills from his collection, and slapped them unceremoniously into her waiting hand.

Louisiana counted the amount before smirking at her coworker, a sardonic glint in her eye, and skeptically asked him, “Are you really trying’a pull this?”

Maine sighed again and rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, casting a look across the room, where Wyoming was deep in conversation with New Hampshire and sending furious glances their way.

Finally, he relented and handed her several more bills.

They young woman beamed at him, and took a happy drink of her coffee, her glow diminishing slightly when she realized that it had gotten cold. Still, Louisiana thought gleefully, at least I got paid.

“Thanks, big guy,” she said, as sincere as either men had ever seen her. “See you during training?”

Maine nodded and exited the mess hall, Louisiana following him as far as the door, and heading back to the table with a new cup of coffee.

After settling back into her seat, huddled around her cup, she and Dan said in companionable silence.

“So,” Dan ventured after several minutes of silently watching Wyoming and New Hampshire speak in low, urgent voices. “Was he any good?”

The red-haired Freelancer glanced over at her friend in surprise. Then her eyes lit up and her expression settled into a sarcastic smirk. “Graveyard shift for security,” she guessed.

Dan nodded and added sugar to his own cup.

Louisiana shrugged and leaned back. “Relatively fresh breath; acceptable use of tongue; strong hands.”

The man before her gave the agent a flat look. “Is that really all you’re gonna say? And I thought we were friends.”

She shot Dan an amused look. “Why are you so interested?”

The Irish soldier straightened somewhat. “… I guess I just figured that somebody would have told you. You really don’t know,” he stated curiously.

“Told me what?”

Either it was her imagination, or Dan’s Irish accent thickened noticeably when he began speaking again. “When ya started hanging out wit me, dinnae somebody pull ya aside and say, ‘Hey, dat O’Hara, he’s on the down-low’?”

Louisiana blinked in memory of the odd occurrence. “Ye-e-es,” she replied, drawing the word out and making it three syllables, obviously not understanding what her friend was getting at.

Dan just sort of stared nonplussed at the equally-flummoxed Freelancer. Then he shrugged and forced his eyes away from her face, and said in an overly-blasé manner, “Well, as far why I’m curious, Maine’s a fairly good-lookin’ lad. B’sides, his arms are ta die far.”

Louisiana stared for a moment—half trying to understand the jump from weird run-ins with soldiers to Maine and his edible arms and half trying to understand the brogue that was still thicker than usual.

She examined her friend closely, from his almost-unnaturally blue eyes housed by long auburn lashes to the small nose that sat above soft lips and perfect white teeth. He was quite pretty, actually—masculine, yet soft. And there was something lurking in those eyes, some kind of worry that bordered on fear. Almost like he was afraid of her reaction to whatever it was that he was trying to say.

The cherry-red-haired Freelancer examined their line of discussion so far, looking for any kind of reason that he might think she’d ever not be okay with him…

Light dawned. “Oh.”

The Irishman gave his younger friend a mystified glance, but his accent lessened slightly after he cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck. “Ye-e-a-ah. What did ya think they meant when they said that?”

The Freelancer blinked so slowly that Dan was afraid that he might have broken her. “I just thought that you were a really down-to-earth kind of guy,” she answered, bewilderedly but honestly. The encounter with one of the other soldiers shortly after she’d arrive, and met one Daniel O’Hara, was so odd that she’d merely brushed it off at the time.

The Irish soldier in question simply stared at Louisiana. “… I’m embarrassed for ya, lass,” he said expressionlessly, and she flushed.

Well, this is a tad awkward… I think I just threw off our groove.

“So…” she eventually said, taking a surreptitious sip from her mug. “Ahem, sorry to disappoint you, but there’s not much to tell.”

Dan raised his eyebrows, and fell back into their usual easy conversation with a mental shrug. Evidently, there wasn’t much of a difference between the behavior of Informed Louisiana and Uninformed Louisiana, regardless. “You two were lookin’ pretty cosy with each other outside your quarters.”

“That was the fault of my good friend, Jack, and his demonic pet goose.” Louisiana shrugged unconcernedly, noticing that the Irishman’s accent had faded back to normal. It seemed as if its increase was brought on by stress. “Turns out Wyoming made a bet with Maine involving me and the supposed ‘events’ of last night. I played along because he promised me a portion of the winnings if I did.”

At that, the blue-eyed soldier began to laugh so hard he actually inhaled some of his coffee. “Maine bet Wyoming that he could nail you?” Dan was eventually able to gasp out.

Louisiana settled her expression into a wry smirk, trying not to let her own mirth show in the face of her friend’s amusement.

“Yup,” she said, nodding before letting go and allowing a real smile shine through. “So I spent basically the whole night pounding on the wall while we played that headband-game. You know, the one where you have to guess what the card on your forehead says?”

The Irish soldier smirked at the young woman. “Bet that was real rewarding,” he said impishly. The Freelancer let out a startled laugh and shook her head.

Still chuckling a minute or two later, Louisiana and Dan got up, disposed of their cups, and exited the mess hall. They meandered around the ship for about an hour, mostly walking down deserted corridors and ducking around corners lest someone with actual authority catch them and order the two soldiers to do something constructive.

(And, no, stalking the Counselor throughout the Mother of Invention so they could sneak into his office and turn all the furniture upside-down didn’t count. They’d checked.)

Louisiana was sitting cross-legged on top of one of the tables in an abandoned classroom the Director used to teach AI-theory when she finally remembered her promise to O’Hara.

“So,” she said, turning and readjusting her position so that she was lying supine on the table. “Who’s this mysterious brother of yours?”

The red-haired young woman stretched her arm up as far as it would go, so that her fingers brushed the screen that Dan was messing around on as she spoke.

The Irishman huffed and slapped her hand away before she could ruin his game of Minesweeper. “He’s not mysterious,” Dan said exasperatedly, rolling his eyes at her antics.

Louisiana snorted.

“He must not be Irish, either; otherwise I would have noticed and put the pieces together.” She looked up at her Standard Issue friend, stretching her limbs like a cat so that her joints popped, and settling with her arms behind her head as a cushion.

Dan made a mistake, resulting in the sound of a miniature explosion, and had to restart his 999-mines game, but didn’t respond.

“C’mon,” Louisiana huffed, put out by his silence. “You know you wanna tell me.” Then a thought occurred to her as she saw the soldier’s ears heat up.

“What—is it embarrassing? When I’m not around do you guys braid each other’s hair and debate who’s the coolest Jonas Brother?”

She gave a gasp, and clutched her throat in mock-horror. “Is it Wisconsin?”

“No, it’s not. And no, we don’t,” Dan answered, smirking down at the screen. “But it’s totally Nick.”

Louisiana grinned and answered without hesitation. “Oh yeah, hands down. Kevin’s the talent, though.”

“All Kevins are talented,” the Irishman said easily, fingers flying over the pressure-sensitive screen in an effort to beat his own high-score. The reply of “Damn straight” tickled Dan’s memory, and he felt vaguely as if he’d had this conversation before, but shook off the feeling.

Honestly, they probably had pursued this line of conversation before but had been too drunk for it to stick in his mind.

After another few minutes of her wheedling, the soldier finally gave in to Louisiana’s odd combination of Annoy-Them-Until-They-Give-Me-What-I-Want mentality and Puppy-Dog-Eyes form of coercion.

The Freelancer looked at Dan expectantly, her blue-green eyes wider than their usual half-lidded, unimpressed look as she attempted to look more persuasive. Despite her still being upside-down, the effect was rather becoming, though not in the way she intended. The desired seeming-innocence was complemented by just enough of an evil glint in her eye and the perpetually-wicked smirk that played around her lips.

If he were any other male in the universe, it might have been what did him in—putting everything together gave her a kind of Naughty Schoolgirl vibe—but really it was just the whining he couldn’t put up with. Louisiana had learned within their first ten minutes together that she couldn’t con him.

“Fine,” the Standard Issue soldier relented. “Oregon and I are half-brothers.”

“What?!” Louisiana choked out, half-disbelieving and half-mortified, rolling onto her stomach to get a proper look at him, crossing and re-crossing her ankles in the air. “You’re telling me that el puertorriqueño hermoso whose ass I’ve been complimenting since Day One, is your brother?!”

Dan seemed to regain his good humor at how many octaves Louisiana’s voice shot through, and grinned broadly. “Yup! I s’pose I should have seen that you didn’t know, considering all the things you were sayin’ about ‘Regano.”

Then he smirked. “You know, lass, I’m surprised at how downright filthy that mouth of yours can get.”

Louisiana decided to take the high road—the mature route, if you will—and stuck her tongue out at the other soldier. She opened her mouth to reply with the filthiest thing that came to mind, but both shot up from their seats when they heard the Director’s voice echoing down the hall.

They booked it out of the classroom and darted around the corner as stealthily as they could manage, breaking out into a full sprint when they were out of sight of the room.

After putting what seemed to be enough distance between themselves and the Texan Director of Project Freelancer, Louisiana grabbed Dan’s arm and began pulling him in the direction of the training floors.

“Where are we goin’ now?”

The Freelancer grinned. “You’re going to introduce me to your cute-ass brother, that’s where!” Louisiana answered gleefully.

Dan’s shot her a Look.

“You’ve already met him,” he said flatly.

“Not as your cute-ass brother, though,” the Freelancer insisted.

The Irish soldier sighed, but went along with the young woman, as her coffee had clearly kicked in. Besides, Oregon had been giving his fellow agent rather appreciative looks lately.

Perhaps this was the best way to break the ice, as Oregon was clearly not just going to strike up a friendly conversation with any opening-line other than, “I liked how you kicked that enemy soldier’s head in!”

Really, the Hispanic man was just hopeless.